Ortlieb Office Bag – Road Test

Well today the my new Ortlieb Office Bag was tested by commuting to work on my bicycle. It carried all I needed it to carry, which included my Asus netbook, a change of clothes and lunch. It mounted onto the rack well with the QL2 mounting system which is so easy to adjust. When off the bike the bag stands up neatly not constantly falling over like my Carradice bag did. All in all very happy with the bag. I can see why people rave about Ortlieb.

hello,from reading aronud the internet, i have a feeling that carbon fails more often than we would like to admit, but that manufacturers do what they have to do to keep it quiet. just like the pharmaceutical industry also knows how to keep certain things quiet. and this is potentially one of the reasons why i don’t hear about law suitsi’ve ridden 100% carbon (integrated handlebars, frame, fork and wheels) for years and yes i believe carbon is the toughest. but strength is not the issue, failure is. carbon still fails, probably as much as the other materialsmy impression is that the tests don’t account for real life riding situations: for example, looking at the tests described in your article, i can’t really see how these represent what my fork goes through when i am actually out training. they seem to blatantly overemphasise one dimension in order to completely ignore smaller but very significant others. the braking tests on carbon clinchers is another good example of test inadequacy (roll 12 seconds to reach 50km/h, brake from 50 to 0km/h in 4 seconds, repeat for at least cycles): the wheels pass all the testing but will fail the very first time you apply the brakes out on the roadmy other thought is that maybe some people don’t really know how to mount carbon components on a bike and then these components fail,or maybe carbon is too much of a challenge for certain bike parts from a manufacturing point of view (reproducibility of specs (specifications) during manufacture)and even though it’s strong it seems we have to look a lot more after carbon than any other material if our bike is made of it